A front page excerpt

Stuffed Head

The Vrekli had charged him a small fortune for the gene-tailored symbiotes, and it had taken weeks for him to get used to the squirming feeling in his nasal passages, but it was worth it to be at long last rid of the allergies that had made his life a misery since childhood. The tiny slime worms reliably devoured every speck of pollen, every fragment of dust-mite, every molecule of each airborne allergen that had plagued him in the past, before they could cause the vestige of a reaction.

What he shouldn’t have done was to spring for the recreational-hallucinogen nanobot inhaler on Chur’r. There seemed to be a struggle for supremacy going on inside his sinuses—some kind of hierarchical dispute—and even though he was zoned to the gills, he had now been sneezing nonstop for at least two hours. The spasms were simultaneously a delightful metaphor for a pervasive sense of oneness with the universe, and absolutely unbearable.

What Have You Done to be Happy Today? – Kimberly Kaufman

I guess it started with the robot talking to me at the front of Perfect Pizza. It was the check-out clerk, one of the humanoid ones, vaguely male with his square features, bald head and glass eyes. His pupils dilated when the clouds covered the sun, and he had specks of color in each iris: blue and grey, occasionally red. The ‘bot was just human enough to feel comfortable ordering a personal pizza from, yet small and deformed enough to remind us humans that we still dominated the earth. This one was permanently stuck to the counter, with a human-shaped torso, head and arms bursting from the white plastic like an eerie modern centaur.

All the check-out robots were programmed to say specific phrases in response to human interaction, with little variance. “And what kind of toppings would you like?” they would ask after you ordered your pizza. Some days, the only words ever spoken to me were those of the fast-food check-out ‘bot.

Next, the inevitable payment question: “How would you like to pay, ma’am, credit card or G.S.?” Even the robots used the initials G.S. instead of “general stipend,” and pretended that paying with a credit card was still an option. As if anyone who could use a credit card, and not the stipend, would be in a pizza joint.

And at the very end of the transaction, in most of these fast food restaurants, the robot would offer some last line to make you walk away feeling inspired. If you were eating at Happy Burger they’d say, “Have a happy-dappy day!” At Soyfarm Panda, the robot would say, “May your stomach be full and your mind at peace.” At Perfect Pizza, the robots would usually finish with the line, “We hope this pizza helps you to be happy today!”